With a camera in hand at all times, I respond to stimuli that jostle my internal sense of normalcy. I suppose that is a very subjective term: "normalcy." I have photographed riots, celebrities, and the Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square Garden. I grew up and lived most of my life in New York City and admit to feeling accustomed to everyday urban oddity. Since moving to the desert, many of the apparently small happenings of life or ordinary scenes in the extra-terrestrial landscape of the Southwest provide an exciting substrate for me to respond photographically. Mundane and cyclic occurrences of seasons, decay, human negligence, and interpersonal connection are the impetus for my reactions and explorations in the photographs of "The Fire In the Freezer."
My writing follows a similar trajectory. However, instead of my camera and my current life, I use my memory as a space to visit, extract, and recount remarkable moments. Through reflection, I write current and past events in my life into strophes and vignettes. Much like my process of sequencing photographs, I then move the segments around to suggest possible connections.
The photographs and writing of "The Fire In the Freezer" are hardbound in separate books. Both the books are housed side by side in a slipcase which conceptually suggests the interdependent relationship of one book to the other. The book containing the text has no photographs. The book containing photographs contains no text unless it appears in the images. "The Fire in the Freezer" is a personal documentary project that reaches its apex when the words and images are considered together in the mind of the audience.
Perhaps it is a pyrrhic task of sorts: gleaning bits of an ever-evolving and fluid narrative to create a whole. New information has an uncanny ability to either confirm familiar notions or to further dilute diaphanous truths: illusions of a finite trajectory can be shattered in an instant. I photograph and write to create and consider evidence of my life. I photograph and write to discover what exists in rich interim moments— in spite of knowing I will sometimes be troubled by what I have found.
